Norwegian Wood

I'm halfway through Norwegian Wood (Noruei No Mori) and I realise that I am becoming quite well atuned to the main elements of the Murakami style and technique.

• He likes to introduce a new character with each main shift in time and place
• These characters are often allowed to tell us quite a long story nestled within the main narrative
• The speeches with which the characters reveal themselves to us are usually broken up by an outside incident
• The main narrator character is self consciously a detached individual "devoid of special features" who is fairly reluctant to describe his internal states at key moments in the plot
• Around him there are several troubled women working through their issues
• These women embody alternative life choices for the central male
• There is deliberate repetition of character names and traits across his fictional world
• Pairs of siblings are a recurring motif as are wells.

Bach and Brahms get a few mentions in this novel, appropriately enough because Murakami himself can be very Bach in some passages and rather Brahms-like in others.

One of the main female characters, Midori, describes early on how she makes money annotating maps in a way that can only be an instance of Murakami gently mocking the way he himself always likes to draw our attention to one striking, momorable detail in every descriptive passage:

"Like you put in a little something that nobody else has written and the people at the map company think you're a literary genius and send you more work...Put in one episode like that and people love it, it's so graphic and sentimental. The usual part timer doesn't bother with stuff like that, but I can make money from what I write."

I think I'll have to return later to this topic of how the output of many artists working in different media could be characterised as a constant repackaging of the same preocupations and the same basic thematic and stylistic ingredients.